A voter only alters the outcome of an election if her/his vote is pivotal. A leading innovation of recent years in game theory applied to politics is Austen-Smith and Banks' analysis of pivotal voting, yielding a special form of strategic voting such that rational voters would vote against the side they favor if the decision were to be made by their vote alone. This note gives a non-mathematical version of the ASB argument, and explains why the result requires conditions which, in fact, are unlikely ever to be observed under actual conditions of social choice.
Austen-Smith, David
and Jeff Banks (1996) `Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem', American Political Science Review90: 34-45.
2.
Feddersen, Timothy J.
and Wolfgang Pesendorfer (1996) `The Swing Voter's Curse', American Economic Review86: 408-424.
3.
Feddersen, Timothy J.
and Wolfgang Pesendorfer (1998) `Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts under Strategic Voting', American Political Science Review92: 23-35.
4.
Feddersen, Timothy J.
and Wolfgang Pesendorfer (1999a) `Abstention in Elections with Asymmetric Information and Diverse Preferences', American Political Science Review93: 381-398.
5.
Feddersen, Timothy J.
and Wolfgang Pesendorfer (1999b) `Elections, Information Aggregation and Strategic Voting', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA96: 10572-4.
6.
Ladha, Krishna, Gary Miller and Joe Oppenheimer (1996) `Information Aggregation by Majority Rule: Theory and Experiments', Mimeo, University of Maryland.
7.
Margolis, Howard (2000a) `Game Theory and Juries: a Miraculous Result', Mimeo, University of Chicago.
8.
Margolis, Howard
(2000b) `Pivotal Voting and the Emperor's New Clothes', Social Choice and Welfare (in press).
